How do we fall in love with cities?

How do we fall in love with cities? What gives a city its spirit? People always say home isn’t a place but the people you share it with. And maybe that’s true, humans adapt quickly, yet the love for the place that held your firsts can’t quite be replicated.

I’ve visited many cities and admired them: the architecture, the nature, the culture. They were beautiful. Some cities are captivating from the outside, but you don’t dream about them. They don’t interrupt your thoughts. They don’t sneak into your mind when you’re exhausted or lonely or overwhelmed. But the cities that shape you when you’re young carry a different kind of presence. They follow you, even if they’re imperfect, or perhaps because of that, they can follow you very far away.

Sometimes a city is only as vibrant as the life you build inside it. Even the prettiest cities can lose their color when your days feel repetitive and disconnected. And then you catch yourself thinking about someplace else, its imperfect streets, its old buildings, as they carry some part of you: the arguments, the laughter, the late-night conversations. Over time that becomes a city’s music. It isn’t always happy, but it’s alive.

And then there are cities that remain grey no matter how “ideal” they are. There are no sounds no matter how loud the parties get, and no color no matter how impressive the landscape is. Something feels muted, like the sound hasn’t turned on yet. Maybe it’s because you haven’t lived enough of your life there for the colors to settle in.

Maybe that’s why falling in love with a city is so rare, a city only becomes meaningful when it holds a piece of you that you didn’t realize was important at the time. Maybe falling in love with a city is simply falling in love with the version of yourself that existed there. And maybe the hardest part of leaving that city is realizing you’re trying to build that kind of connection from scratch while missing the place that already knows who you were.